Happy tenth anniversary to Seasonal Spuffy! Yay! I’m so happy to have found this fandom and all of you! :)
The following ficlet is from the yet unposted Chapter 12 of my post-S5/S6 rewrite, Edge of Sorrow, Heart of Truth. You may have seen excerpts from earlier chapters that I posted for the last round of SeasonalSpuffy. You don’t need to have read the other 11 chapters to read this!
Title: Relief
Author: feliciacraft
Rating: NC-17
Setting: S6 AU
Word Count: ~2800.
Beta’d by the stupendous All4Spike, before I tore it apart. :P Special guest red pencil by the fabulous and illuminous AnnaH and bewilde. You have my undying gratitude. All remaining errors are the result of my last-minute tinkering.
Author’s Note/Continuity: Following my version of Buffy’s resurrection, Spike brings a traumatized Buffy home (for reasons that would be revealed in later chapters). This story opens immediately following the reunion between Buffy and Dawn at the Summers residence. A few sentences may make little sense on their own out of necessity for continuity as part of Edge of Sorrow, but hopefully do not drastically detract the story’s overall entertainment value. (See Chapter 11 and Chapter 10 if you’re curious about how the resurrection went down in this ‘verse.)
Spike forced himself to let go of the doorknob to Buffy’s room before he tore it off, and pussyfooted down the stairs. Buffy was going to be all right. Be a while, a long while even, but seeing her sister again seemed to have snapped her out of it, whatever it’d been. Blood called to blood, and all that. Best that he made himself scarce. Niblet needed some time alone with big sis, and vice versa, and theirs was the kind of tearful, heartfelt reunion best unspoiled by the awkward third-wheel of a not-so-secret-torch-carrying vampire.
He was relieved that Dawn hadn’t drilled him with twenty questions about Buffy’s return, not that he would’ve been able to cough up any answers himself. Just making it up as he went along, was all.
At Buffy’s grave she’d screamed until she’d run out of breath and lost consciousness again (and Spike’s ears had rung for sodding ever after that), at which point he’d thrown her into the back of the DeSoto (battling a nasty sense of déjà vu in the process), resolving to get her home first, then suss out the rest later. As dictated by Murphy’s Law, she’d come to in the car a couple of miles shy of 1630 Revello Drive. Her panic-induced attempt to first jump out of the speeding car, then, failing that (due to Spike’s foresight to having buckled her in), to sodding fight Spike for its control, had nearly caused him to crash the DeSoto and kill them both. In the brief history of vamp-led rescues, this had got to be the worst.
He’d scarcely managed to get both of them home unscathed, but the DeSoto’s grille had paid the price—a new dent the size and shape of a handicapped parking sign, outlined with bits of fade-resistant, blue reflective paint.
Not that he’d cared. Not with the prize being Buffy alive and more or less in one piece, at least physically. As for psychologically…well. She’d alternated between fits of delirium and brief reprieves of lucidity, cowering in terror then lashing out feebly but indiscriminately in her weakened confusion, like a trapped, wild animal sensing the end of her days. Nailing the whole crazy bint act that’d have given Drusilla a run for her money.
What was a vamp to do, best intentions and all? What with both of them looking like sodding rejects from a mud wrestling contest, Spike had thought, hell, nothing like a hot shower to chase the chills away and set ‘em both to sorts.
It’d seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.
Shaking his head, he let out a derisive chuckle at himself. Brilliant. Right. That should’ve been the first clue. But he’d been running on empty, and with adrenaline dictating most of his actions, the intoxicating scent of pure Buffy from her injuries calling for the rise of his demon had just about blown his circuit. Biting his own cheek could only go so far towards providing temporary relief.
So some distance was probably best. Alone at last, he let his game face fall in shamed defeat, and raided the fridge for what was permitted of a vamp on the straight and narrow. Taking it out on the blood bags was an act without honor, but it wasn’t like anyone would bother to check the trash for evidence of his savage beast concealed within. Three bags of cold, vile pig swill later, with his hunger leashed and settling below the surface of his swelling self-hatred, he knew it was doing its job. Even the blood-splattered kitchen counter gave him a perverted sense of pride.
“Oooh, you have sexy ridges on!”
The Bot’s bright, brilliant smile and sing-song voice jolted him like a sodding kick in the gut. He sputtered, more blood dribbling down his chin.
“Not now,” he managed to spit out, turning his head away, because nobody deserved to bear witness to his moment of weakness, not even a machine.
Undeterred, it took a step forward. “I could wait for you downstairs,” it said, its coquettish voice making his stomach turn. “Since the other me has my bed and you didn’t want me up there.”
“You leave her alone!” he growled, then at its flinch, added as contrition set in, “Please.”
“Well…” the Bot seemed to reconsider, then brightened. “I could patrol!”
“Yeah, sure. Knock yourself out.”
Spike made sure it’d left, marching out of the house confidently with a battle cry of, “Vampires beware!” before he limped down the squeaky stairs to the basement to crawl into his narrow cot. Having finally liberated his raging erection, he stretched out on his back, one arm comfortably folded behind his head. He’d saved the best for last, he did, and now, now, he finally allowed himself to indulge in a replay of the delicious hour he’d shared with Buffy alone.
In the blackest hour of the night, with the full moon at the zenith, he let the memory wash over him and consume him whole—
Not the most promising of beginnings, that. His stripping the Slayer of her tattered and blood-stained burial garb, in her bathroom with the frilly girly wallpaper and too many personal products with sharp chemicals that stood in for coconut or vanilla or strawberry that made his nose itch. While she hugged herself for the warmth that wouldn’t come, looking so utterly lost that even he couldn’t ignore the alarm bells going off in his head.
“Let’s get you warm, love,” he said, trying to one-up the stifling silence, knowing by now not to expect a response.
Never had he witnessed the Slayer resigned to the fate of a victim. Even at her most desperate, even on Glory’s tower and mere steps away from her death, in the aftermath of the worst failure of his unlife (always so bloody vivid in the back of his mind as if it were yesterday), she’d been serene, and strong; she’d been a general leading her troops to victory, an undefeated warrior actualizing her self-sacrifice as the most brazen two-finger salute to the sodding universe. Checkmate.
But then the delicious sensory overload of Buffyness threatened to drown out cohesive thoughts, calling forward other, stockpiled memories and senses. They overlapped and intermingled with cashmere sweaters (whisper-soft), stolen thongs (delicate and potent), bruised chocolates (the bitch!), and choked passion (unspilled blood, like unwritten poetry). All in culmination to unrequited love, love in its most familiar and punishing form.
As if on cue, the erection he’d been fighting all night got a second wind, straining hard into the zipper of his jeans. Not getting the memo that this was to be a platonic bath before sending Buffy off to her beddy-bye, and not an erotic prelude to slipping her into something a little more comfortable just so that he could tear it off her eager body, dewy wet and glistening from the shower and anticipation.
“I’m a saint,” he snickered, shaking his head in disbelief. “William the bloody, goddamned saint.”
He rolled all of his impotent rage into shoving the shower curtain out of the way, turned on the shower, and slapped the inside of the bathtub. Aiming for an even tone, with some semblance of success, he managed to say, “In you go then, easy peasy.”
Buffy looked at the gushing shower head, and looked back at him expectantly. “William,” she whispered.
Was she remembering? The jolt of joy that shot through him dissipated just as quickly when he searched her eyes and found only blankness where recognition should be. Just repeating what he’d said, was all. “Uh…” he raked his fingers through his hair, damp from the shower steam. This was going to turn out exactly like leading a horse to water, wasn’t it?
“Right then.” Just his luck that everything would have to be done the hard way (and goddammit he was not thinking about his cock). He kicked off his boots, peeled off his socks and his t-shirt, and rolled up his jeans. As usual he wore nothing underneath, and he wasn’t about to let out the monster (damn right!).
“Like this. Like”—he winced—“like William.” He stepped into the far end of the bathtub and offered her his hand, then guided her in to face him so that the shower stream came down on her back. Buffy let out a soft gasp when the water made contact with her body, then leaned back and relaxed her posture, her last shivers subsiding under the hot spray.
For a moment he’d just stared, gormless and gobsmacked, nostrils flaring, taking in the sight that reenacted an embarrassingly recurrent dream, saturating his lungs with the potent richness that was Buffy’s scent. Steam had risen from her heated flesh as the spray continued to pelt her neck, her back, bunching her hair and hugging the curves of her body to stream down her legs, mapping tantalizing, dangerous territory.
His knees threatened to buckle, but he was made of sterner stuff, dammit, so he held his breath and stood his ground. The swirls at the bottom of the bathtub seemed to have caught Buffy’s attention, and she watched, totally fascinated, as the brown tinged with red first pooled at her feet, before sluicing into the drain behind her.
“For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Some fucking ancient Sunday school drivel had the nerve to rise from nowhere to Spike, but it didn’t really describe the situation, did it? “No,” he rejected it with vehemence, picking up a sponge from the corner shower basket, and worked a dollop of a bodywash curiously named “Tahitian Passion” into a lather. “Dust I am. But you, Slayer, you’re somethin’ else.”
He coaxed the arms wrapped around her body to relinquish their grip, and began tracing her delicate contours with an even more delicate touch.
“Dust is what you make of the nightmares that haunt other humans.” He dabbed the sponge over her flushed cheeks, stroked the elegance of her neck to the hollow of her throat, and traced the tautness of her clavicle to her heaving chest. From under her lashes, Buffy peered up to meet his gaze.
“Dust is what you render demons into that dare cross your path.” He picked up her dominant hand, avoiding the bruised knuckles, and lathered up the wrist, the forearm, the elbow, to the shoulder that had borne the weight of the world, then down the other arm. He paid no mind to the water splashing on his chest and traveling down his jeans-clad legs.
“From dust you emerge, and out of dust you triumph.” Without taking his eyes off her, he reached behind her to glide the sponge over her shoulder blades, across the tightness of her back, down the strength of her spine to the swell rising from either side of its base.
“Dust is what lies beneath you, what is destined for your enemies.” He tapped her heart with the sponge, but it was the nipples that rose up to beg for his attention, short-circuiting his brain. He couldn’t exactly deny them their due, and with the rest of his speech forgotten, he thought he might as well try to recoup what remained of his evil image. After all (as his jeans could attest), he was still the Big—well, maybe not Bad anymore, but certainly—Something, but the caresses he bestowed upon the soft curves of her breasts bore a gentleness that belied his passion.
As he grazed one nipple she closed her eyes and arched her back, causing rivulets of foam and bubbles to surge across the plane of her midsection to be caught by the soft brown curls below, where their descent, momentarily halted, gathered in strength to leap into a waterfall. Spike’s unbeating heart leaped into his throat. His hand followed the water’s journey to linger slightly at her center before painting each leg with the sponge, all the way to her wiggling toes. Never mind that he was crouching in the shower in his jeans, sopping wet, like a pathetic fool.
Were it not for her hitched breath and racing pulse he would’ve hated himself for it, a moment of stolen, guilty pleasure, a sizable pothole while he was supposedly taking the high road. Her scent and proximity made his brows twitch and his fangs itch. He clenched his jaws and his hands, and swallowed the saliva flooding his mouth.
He’d been a willing masochist in Dru’s sadistic games many a time, but this…tease with no relief in sight was a torture of a different kind, and of his own making. All this, and he hadn’t even gotten to shampooing her hair yet—that golden silk with its gravity-defying bounce. Was he digressing? Must be the bodywash, intoxicating scent with a name like one of those cocktails that Darla had favored in the roaring twenties…
He was vaguely aware of Buffy’s heartbeat getting closer, almost vibrating his eardrums, until he registered that she was bending down slowly to take the sponge from his hand. Perhaps it was the steam fogging up his vision, but as their eyes connected (he could only imagine his as being full of raw hope and naked longing—he could be such a jerk sometimes), he felt a fragile intimacy between them. Was that a flicker of recognition? A hint of understanding? Buffy grimaced, almost a smile. That was a start, right?
Next he knew, she was pulling him up to a standing position from worshipping at her feet, where he belonged and tenderly, raising the sponge to wipe one side of his forehead while he dumbly stared. Showing him the grime, she said something that made him want to clutch her to his chest and weep:
“Not dust. Not today.”
That shower had been just one happy ending short of a wet dream, an easy thing for his imagination to fix. In the privacy of the basement, his hand had followed his blood to his cock, gliding gently at first, smooth as the silky touch of Buffy’s hair. Nice ‘n’ slow soon turned into fast and earnest, as the mental image morphed from the tease into an enthusiastic hands-on exploration, with Buffy’s fingers curved tightly around his shaft, pulling in rhythm with her heartbeat, causing his blood to surge in time with hers. He felt himself swell further, if that was possible. No longer holding back, he vamped out to better recall her scent from the back of his throat. It was nothing but surrender at that point, as he pictured scooping up an armful of willing Buffy to straddle his body, gazing into her eyes as she leaned back against the wall and maneuvered his sensitive tip against her quivering opening.
His hips rose up from the bed as she lowered herself onto him, inch by painstaking inch, and the heat that gloved him left him all but breathless. He pumped with all the passion of a dream renewed, of hope for the most hopeless of an existence, of carefully preserved memories of her delicious moans of pleasure from that one time, the only time they’d been together, but oh, Buffy was back now, he’d cradled her body, pumped her heart beneath his palms, breathed life into her lungs, then borrowed her body heat, even tasted her blood; Buffy, his beautiful Slayer, sun goddess, sex kitten, golden warrior—
When the edge rushed towards him he didn’t jump, he soared, higher and higher to such an altitude that the air thinned and he was sure the sun would blind and melt him, but the heat felt so good, and falling brought such sweet release. Coming back down he wallowed in the satiation, with his blood still singing, Buffy, Buffy, Buffy… and his fantasy so sharp in his mind he could taste it on his tongue. He kept his eyes screwed shut to fend off reality, and permitted drowsiness to gradually overtake him, even if first light was still hours away. There was a niggling thought at the back of his mind, overlaid on top of the continuation of his favorite dream, of something important, something he was neglecting. A slippery thing—whatever it was, fading faster than blood was being restored back to his brain, that he thought he might as well take the path of the least resistance. It was clearly pointless to try to sort it out until he’d had a bit of a kip.
When the dream grabbed his attention again he gave up the fight and let it pull him deeper, into the best sleep he’d had in a hundred and forty-seven days.
(End)
Originally posted at http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/526827.html
